User talk:Edhubbard
Hi Ed, Really glad you have come to join us, with some really interesting areas of expertise. Sorry if the welcome has been delayed but people are away on holiday and Ive just been over to the States for a conference. You obviously know the ropes but I will include our usual welcome pack as it might contain interesting information for you, as we are somewhat different from Wikipedia. After I have had some sleep I will be happy to answer any questions on my talk page. Dr Joe Kiff - User:Lifeartist (talk) 07:21, 8 August 2006 (UTC) The structure of knowledge So I have had some sleep and I thought I would try and pose some questions to you to help us think about how much further we can go with this site and in doing so review some of our goals. As I explain it to you I hope to clarify our ideas and to develop a rationale we can present to other academics as they join us. Ive read the Synaesthesia article and its getting towards featured article status on WP, but here it is a starting point. Here we can go into more academic details as much as we think is useful, not only for the casual general reader but for the professional worker in the area, for people who have the condition and their clinicians. So the first question is what is the structure of knowledge in the area? How could this be thoroughly examined in a series of linked articles so that each research question has its own page, with all relevant papers cited, linked to fulltext where possible. Is it worth having pages coming of the main synesthesia page for each of the combinations of modalites sight-sound, sound-smell etc? Each one of those with a genetics page, a neurophysiology page, each collecting together all the literature. To us we are building am academic tool for thinking in our science. trying to be specific about what we know, about the hypotheses we are exploring, in a way that can be routinely updated (adding new pages as they become appropriate, keeping the literature references updated as new findings are published etc). This has never been possible in public before. I guess small groups have tried to do this informally , but with wikis we can make this the bedrock of a coordinated current account of our science. We think this will lead to fresh thinking, the generation of better hypotheses etc. Is such an enterprise of interest to you? Would it be of use to you and your colleagues? Can you see how it could work given the literally unlimited physical capacity of the software? Could you see how such a detailed account could give a neuro researcher specialising in the neurology of hearing, or a clinican, easy and quick access to your knowledge area. If we each build up our own areas citing all papers, linking them to full text we then start to rebuild the research record of our science in the public domain, giving open access to researchers, professionals and thinkers around the world. The way to do this is to copy your article links to a page off your user page and for you to keep this up to date. From this page each paper could then have its own page on the wiki, allowing for specific discussion about it. In time as new papers are added we have a forum for immediate feedback, professional peer review of findings, to speed up the desemination and evaluation of new work, in a way that has not been possible before. Each time the paper is cited, the name (carried by Hubbard , E (2006a) etc) would also lead to that page ( see Journal article record card and for books Book record card. As you can see we are seeking to go beyond WP and develop this technology into constructing an academic and professional resource of tremendous power. I would be very interested in your feedback, particularly if you can see other uses for what we are doing. This is still early days and we are trying to clarify the potential and the possibilities, and to negotiate with academics and professionals to see if they could, would engage in such a task. Perhaps you could approach your colleagues and see if they would make use of such a site. We also would like eventually to translate the site ( in part, at least)in all the major languages so that it is an international resource. Any help from them in this regard would be helpful to. Dr Joe Kiff - User:Lifeartist (talk) 14:05, 8 August 2006 (UTC) Continued discussion Hi Ed. Just to let you know that I have continued our conversation on my talkpage. Sorry for the delay in replying but I have been thinking!!!Dr Joe Kiff - User:Lifeartist (talk) 11:03, 21 August 2006 (UTC)